Within a city, everywhere we turn we encounter difference: neighborhoods, ethnicities, socio-economic classes, ideologies, desires, drives, and approaches. These differences make culture possible and provide the possibility for depth. At times, the vastness of difference may appear chaotic, but in the multitude, we find the birth of order. 

A city’s size manifests the dynamics necessary for organizing principles to organically arise and be individually internalized—the birth of civilization.

In the act of codifying differences, humanity carves order out of disordered reality. Civilization never lands, never stops changing; it continuously churns the substances of nature—subconscious drives, subjectivities’ desires, security’s wet blanket, and the logical structuring necessary for interpretation, prediction, and analysis, however devoid of meaning.

Throughout the ebb and flow of history, order and chaos take turns defining the designations of the day. We can discover the constant churn that we call culture in the history of a single city, a single nexus for difference, and a birthplace of one type of civilization.